mid-2010 macbook air, broadcom wireless problem

Trevoke · Advocate Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 4099 Location: NY, NY

I've successfully removed the OSX virus from the Macbook Air and installed Gentoo.

Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me get the wireless to work. I'm not quite sure what docs to follow and what to set up.

So far I have:

- emerged linux-firmware
- emerged b43-fwcutter
- emerged b43-firmware
- enabled what "I THINK" is the correct module in the kernel.
- emerged wpa_supplicant
- emerged whatever gives me iwconfig -- forgot the name of the package.

Does anyone, by chance, know what I need to do to get this working? I'm REALLY confused now.
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DONAHUE · Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 4:13 am Post subject:

boot the cd, run

ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

According to wikipedia you have a Broadcom 43224 chip. This requires either the proprietary net-wireless/broadcom-sta (which may not work with recent kernels), or the internal brcmsmac driver (which doesn't have power management).
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DONAHUE · Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 8:16 am Post subject:

if lspci -nnk indeed shows that you have bcm43224, menuconfig should include:

Trevoke · Advocate Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 4099 Location: NY, NY

It looks like the only thing I was missing was the Broadcom-specific AMBA stuff in the kernel. Thank you very much!
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robdd · Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:12 am Post subject:

Hi Trevoke,

I have a MacBook Air 3.1 model, which I hope would be the same model as the one you were working on. I found this thread while trying to get the wireless to work, so thanks to DONAHUE for posting that - that now works. But would you, or anybody who has a working Gentoo install on a MacBook3.1be kind enough to post a copy or link to their kernel .config, and also let me know which is the best video driver to use.

I'm going overseas on holidays in a couple of weeks, and the MacBook is nice and small, so I thought I'd take it along. (The MacBook has been sitting in a cupboard for a while, since I loathe MacOs and the Apple walled garden mentatility. And I didn't buy it myself - more of a joke present from my work partners !) But it's been an absolute pig to install Gentoo on. I've spent days learning about EUEFI and efibootmgr and how rEFInd works - and I never really had a burning ambition to know about any of that. I installed Linux Mint first to get a system to chroot from, and the nouveau driver in Linux Mint is very flaky - so I'd like to know if I should just use the fbdev driver, or the closed nvidia driver ?? Any help would be gratefully received.

Regards, Rob.
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Rob Diamond
Gentoo Hack, hack, hacker
Sydney, Australia